SpyParty [official site] – Chris Hecker’s game about blending in with AI lest you reveal yourself as a dirty human and are assassinated – is due to get an update at the end of the week. It’s called The Not-Strictly Ballroom Update and contains a revamped (it’s a makeover on the level of Clueless’s Tai) map and additions to the cast of characters.
SpyParty [official site] – that reverse Turing test of a game where you have to disappear into a party of AI characters, dodging suspicion as a fellow player armed with a single sniper bullet scans for tells – has now unveiled its third group of characters. Amongst the group are 40-something rocker Ms L, Sikh gentleman Mr K and a pair of doctorate-holding identical twins. We nabbed some time with developer Chris Hecker over email to discuss the latest additions. Read on for hair triangles, why you should never wear an ugly sports coat to a party and the limits of geometric nepotism:
Sometimes you see a phrase and it’s like you don’t know how your vocabulary has functioned without it for so long. Today Chris Hecker’s blog (you know – him off Spy Party) introduced me to to the term “l’esports d’escalier“.
It came into his life via a tweet by a chap called Matthew R.F. Balousek and he’s taken it to mean that moment when you realise the perfect play you should have made in a competitive online game well after the window for making said play has passed.
RPS Feature High-frequency Hair-dos
Excellent and terrifying human behaviour sim SpyParty is still in development. I know this because party host Chris Hecker sent an invite to the RPS inbox, asking if we wanted to see the new art for the game. It would be an exclusive soiree just for us. I dressed for the occasion, meaning I put on clothes, and prepared my notebook with all the questions I didn’t get to ask him when he interviewed himself.
In this talk: sniping royalty, hair as a game mechanic, the influence of League of Legends and Dota, and the future of Spy Party.
SpyParty fits into a rather small list of games with the header “stuff I read about in PC Gamer for about thirty years but never actually tried” and also the “games Craig Pearson rather likes” one. They’re similar lists. For the unfamiliar, it’s a one-on-one espionage deal that pits a spy at a party against an onlooking sniper who most identify them before they can carry out their mission. It’s the sort of scenario that lends itself so well to games that it’s surprising it’s taken this long to be done. Probably because of the intense amount of time it’s taking to be done right. A three-man team has been chugging away for over four years, with an Early Access model and upcoming graphics improvements the latest developments. They’ve just buffed up their official website to match and there’s a new trailer available once you’ve completed your assignments, 007.
Sometimes glitches and bugs are more than mere annoyances. Sometimes they’re joyful farce, as in Soldner. Sometimes they turn patch notes into a kind of poetry. Sometimes, as in the SpyParty video below, they’re shrieking nightmare fuel that will keep you awake at night for weeks to come.
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I think part of the fear I had over playing Spy Party rested on the graphics. I might have overcome the horror of attempting the delicately balanced multiplayer if the characters were welcoming and not blank-faced Doctor Who monsters from the planet Do Not Want. That is a problem that Chris Hecker has been working on for some time, and now we can finally see how the new art looks and plays. The beta just updated with a test level, showing off the new room and a few of the new character models. A video is below.
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RPS Feature I Spy Myself
There are times when the RPS Action News Team 3000 is just too busy. Like that time I missed posting about Half-Life 3’s secret crowd-funding effort because I was cleaning the bath (it failed, btw). At those moments, when developers are emailing us exclusives and wiring money to our Swiss bank accounts, we just want the developer to step-up and do the job for us. That actually happened last night. Chris Hecker wanted to talk about Spy Party, but when he e-mailed me I was, er, having a nap. When I came to, my hair was in no fit state for the sort of journalism that RPS demands, so I asked him for a few notes. Well, yada yada yada, he interviewed himself about the upcoming art update to his wonderful game. I intend to do a proper interview with him about Spy Party, but for now here’s Chris Hecker journalisming Chris Hecker. Hard.
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RPS Feature I Spy (Party)
If Spy Party developer Chris Hecker were to look back over the game’s connection logs from the past year, he might notice some strange behaviour. He’d see me arriving, spending a minute in the lobby, then disconnecting. This pattern would be repeated a few times. It wasn’t a technical problem, Chris. Don’t go bug-hunting. Those cold digits spilling over your screen as you search for a flaw wouldn’t have registered the truth of the situation: I am a coward. It was the panic I was feeling over becoming a Spy Party player that was causing me to leave.
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Like most people, I remember the day I first started lusting after Spy Party. It was long before the lengthy, fairly exclusive closed beta, new look, and (I’m pretty sure) my own birth, but I’ll never forget it. But now – finally, mercifully, joyously – anybody can play. Me, you, an especially deceptive Toucan – whoever. All you need is $15 and the steely resolve of an unreadable machine who’s never even contemplated death, let alone feared it.
Spy Party! Come here. You’re taking far too long about this, and I’ve a mind to give your ear a right old clipping. Oh, what’s that, you’ve been busy working on a brand new, completely overhauled and really rather fetching ‘illustrative’ look? Well, alright, I’ll let you off this time though. Just this once mind, and you’re still going to bed with supper tonight.
SpyParty remains one of the most fascinating propositions in indie gaming, but it’s perhaps not all that clear from the outside how the game plays out. Fortunately for the SpyParty-oblivious, Indiegames have spotted that Mr Hecker has posted a tutorial video for his early-access beta folk, and that gives us a good impression of the game’s systems, as well as an idea of how to play. Go take a look, below!
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Chris Hecker has posted over on the SpyParty blog to explain his early-access beta pricing for the game of spy-spotting. “$15 gets you access to the beta SpyParty and all the updates during the beta, access to the private beta website, which includes forums for announcements, finding games, and discussing strategies, and eventually a bug/feature tracking system,” says Hecker. He’s also allow the truly excited to pay more on top of that if they really want to support the project.
Hecker also confirms that he’ll probably miss the “mid-June” launch date for this beta, but he’s busy working ahead on it anyway, and there should be more news soon.
According to the big K, Chris Hecker’s clever game of spies and parties, Spy Party, will soon enter a $15 paid-for beta. It won’t be a free-for-all, however, and there will be waves of invites sent out initially. You can declare your interest by signing up here in a flourish of names and email addresses. Many more details lie beyond that link.
For some further clues about what makes this most social of espionage ’em ups so interesting check out our preview. Check it out. Or else. I mean it.
Andy “Monaco” Schatz’s cat is being slowly broiled alive. It crawled behind the oven, which was in the process of cooking Macaroni & Cheese. It’s only later that Andy’s Delightful Wife is alerted by the frantic yelping of a distressed pussycat. We’re about to play SpyParty at my hotel room when the alert comes through, leading to a frantic cross-San Diego dash to try and rescue the pipping-hot cat from its furnace-crammed state. The Andy is trying to get his landlord on the phone, to see if there’s any reason why they can’t just pull the oven around. He’s failed. Meanwhile, Spy-Party-dev Chris Hecker is insisting that it’ll be fine, and we should just act immediately heft the cooker to release it. Let’s do this thing! We do this thing, and the cat runs free.
I’m not sure this is a metaphor about Chris’s position in the industry or SpyParty or how he’s a man capable of making hard decisions swiftly, but it was too good not to share. And I wanted something to separate this initial report of SpyParty from all the other pieces online, because I’m basically going to echo what they all said. This is looking like something genuinely startling.
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I’ve wanted to write about SpyParty for a week now, since Destructoid’s brilliant write-up. When Wired article’s followed the urge only got worse but… well, I’ve really got nothing else to add to the coverage, as I haven’t played it. So I’ll just point you there. Read both pieces and get excited. It’s the every-controversial Ex-Maxis’ Chris Hecker’s indie game of competitive asymmetrical multiplayer. One player is a spy, trying to perform set tasks at a party. The other is a sniper, with a single bullet, who has to shoot the spy. Pure battle of wits stuff here, and seems totally fascinating. It’s a couple of years away, at least in part due to a major general aesthetic upgrade, but we’ll be watching it. Closely. Trying to work out if it’s a spy.
